The proliferation of travel services on the Internet enables users to search and compare travel alternatives offered by airline carriers, hotels, car rental companies, and online travel agents with their computers. FIG. 1a and FIG. 1b illustrate a display list of airline itineraries by a conventional method. As shown in FIG. 1a and FIG. 1b, for the price of $156 per person, there are three itineraries displayed for departure flights at 7:00 a.m. Similarly, there are multiple itineraries for departure flights at 9:00 a.m. If a user is interested in a different departure time, the 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. departure flights would be irrelevant to the user. Since limited number of itineraries may be displayed on a display device, such as a computer or personal digital assistant (PDA) screen, users are forced to spend time in scanning a long list of travel itineraries over pages of display screens to reach the results that might interest them, many of which are quite similar to each other. The frequent occurrence of similar search results may be perceived as spam or irrelevant, which contributes to a poor user experience of the travel search engine.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and system to allow users to scan a shorter list of travel itineraries to reach the results they are interested in, without losing breadth (for example variety of carriers) and depth (for example multiple itinerary options for similar results).